It probably sounds like some extreme whining to the outside observer, but I really couldn't believe how complicated their sign-up process was in FFXI. I played it near when it was first released and I thought it was okay, but I had to spend a lot of time on school and wasn't really hooked on it so I put it aside. When I went to give it another try again later I simply could not find my log-in credentials or what service I needed to look them up. There were like three different accounts involved.

Sorry guys, but I'm not spending hours trying to retrieve account info. I'll go play one of the other nearly identical games. I think rule one of business is to make it very easy for the customer to give you money.

More telling for Sony MMOs is that EQ2, which has been on the model of one expansion per year since launch, is instead releasing some shady no-content expansion in a month and they've released next to no information about it, including pre-orders or anything.

It's not necessarily TOR as that there are so many options available now and it's at the point in most of their lifecycles that customers are really getting bored with them. It's time for real third generation MMOs to come out. Guild Wars 2 looks to be the only game really innovating thus far, though TOR has some interesting story stuff going on and Planetside 2 will at least be a genre that hasn't had much play outside of the original Planetside.

The Mike Test was clearly superior.

What passes for content otherwise in these games is a boring job for obsessive-compulsives too. The stories are very simple and hours of gameplay can be condensed into maybe a paragraph of actual events. Killing a hard boss for the first time maybe, but mostly the fights are predictable enough that even the slow folks get it with enough repetition. Evenly matched PvP fights sure, but most MMOs are set up that you're always facing a gear or numbers disparity.

I kind of prefer an honest grind to one with a thin layer of delusion covering it. I mean in EQ1 for a hardcore grind group you'd need to break an area using all kinds of pulling techniques, and if you got too many in camp at once by accident your group would need to go into overdrive throwing out mezzes and debuffs and heals, maybe offtanking. Interaction with other players meant all this was never entirely under your control. In a way it was more challenging than some of the scripted boss fights these days.

To be fair, NWN2 is through the Atari store which is among the worst downloadable game stores. The giant red flag is when you check out they ask you to pay for an "extended download service" if you want to be able to download your game more than a month or two in the future. In years of downloading many, many games, the only ones that have caused me problems at all were NWN2, Battlefield 2142, and to some extent FFIX, which were all through smaller publisher stores.

That was my experience from high school eight years ago. I had a buddy who repeated english several times and was eventually held back from graduating for a year until he got it done, but they didn't stop him from advancing to senior year with our class.

The point is that we want passing students to get most of the problems correct. Trust me when I say the entire scale is used in my classes, there are people that get everything from 0 to 60, but if you get below a 60 in my course it equates to consistently demonstrating lack of understanding of the material, which means failure. We don't differentiate degrees of failure because they all have the same consequence.

What's god made of? Where does god live? How does god interact with the universe? Does god have a gender? If so, does god mate? Does god need to eat? How does god deal with entropy? What's the earliest thing god remembers? In short, what about god have you tested, documented and explained? When you provide me with that then god will move into the realm of science and will cease to be just a belief.

Teaching beliefs in a science classroom is just teaching kids how to twist facts to fit their viewpoint. The exact opposite of science. But sure, let's do it. Then let's also teach science from the equally valid viewpoint of an apathetic nihilist. Who gives a shit what your grade is or what we know, we're all going to die and it doesn't mean anything! Then we can teach science from the perspective of a fundamentalist muslim, maybe introduce some patriarchy into the classroom and throw out some burkas so the genetically inferior gender can cover up. Why stop there? Let's teach faith based economics where we rip up our checkbooks and let god sort it out.

I use glorified calculators all the time. I actually wrote a program to prove something numerically. I use computational tools to approximate roots and solve systems of equations. Being a mathematician doesn't mean you never see a number again. Without calculators a lot of us would have to spend a significant amount of time poring over log tables and using numerical techniques by hand.

Why do you need to compete with an MMO? People don't play them to the exclusion of everything else. Especially at this point in the development cycle when most of the content has been out a long time and everyone's just waiting for the next expansion to drop.

Why not? If it's a story you already have seen you can take a pass, if not then you get to see it and can comment on it which is the main reason behind Slashdot!

There's a whole lot of possibilities: find evidence for, show, demonstrate. For what it's worth I find it a little pedantic but I've seen increasing amounts of people confused about the scientific method itself. Scientists being more careful with their terminology might give the hucksters less ammunition about the requisite degree of rigor to "prove" something in science.

It's fun to see what other people are doing occasionally and how they look now if you haven't seen them in a while. I "run into" friends and colleagues from across the country that I haven't seen in forever and have the opportunity to reconnect if I want. It lets me keep track of phone numbers and addresses without keeping a book or having to update it in the very frequent case that they change. Birthdays too! It's very low maintenance and unlike Myspace the form is standardized so I don't end up constantly running into giant flashing gifs, yellow-on-orange-on-Magic Eye backgrounds and music blasting out of my computer.

If you don't dig it that's cool but it is a very useful tool for me.

I had the same problem with BF2142, or at least a very similar one. Their stupid EA downloader thing kept fucking up until I just threw up my hands and stopped playing eventually, then a year later when I went to try it again I couldn't get my account working right. One of the reasons I only buy games through Steam now.

There's hundreds of machines, technologies, chemicals and medicines you implicitly rely on every day to save what required backbreaking labor in centuries past. I'm sure no pill is going to be able to completely replace exercise anyway.